Tag Archives: resilient organisations

Organisational Resilience

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Revised on: 2015-09-16

Organisational Resilience Literature. “What to read, and what not to read”. That could be the popular title of this paper. Written by Alessandro Annarelli and Fabio Nonini their paper on Strategic and operational management of organizational resilience: Current state of research and future directions classifies and sorts more than 70 articles along two axes: static versus dynamic resilience and single organisations versus supply networks or industries.. Essentially, this paper will help you decide which papers that fall into which of these four quadrants and which papers you should read depending on your research interests.

Comprehensive

According to the authors, they did “a systematic literature search and co-citation analysis to investigate the specific research domains of organizational resilience and its strategic and operational management to understand the current state of development and future research directions”. More than 400 papers out of thousands of documents were selected and narrowed down to 70 or so core papers, clearly showing the dominating trends within research into organisational resilience.

1.Theoretical foundations and applications, e.g. Christopher and Peck (2004)
2. Implementation, improvement and measurement of resilience, e.g. Sheffi and Rice (2005)
3. Models for resilience.
4. Other theoretical perspectives.

(The linked papers have been reviewed on this blog)

What to read, or not

In addition, the authors used multidimensional scaling(MDS) to produce a graphic that represents conceptual proximity, or similarity, between publications. This is what I found to be the most interesting part about this paper, because I now can find the most related or otherwise different literature, just by looking at the figure below and going to the reference list in the paper. That is very helpful, indeed.

Annarelli and Nonino (2015)

It’s quite interesting to see where some of the papers that have been reviewed on this blog fall and what papers that are closely related and that I have not yet discovered, which means that I have a lot of work to do in terms of possible reviews on this blog.

Future research

Finally the authors describe 7 areas of future research

Theory testing on design, implementation, and improvement processes to enhance organizational resilience.
Measurement of organizationalandoperationalresilience.
Resilience in Small Medium Enterprises.
Restoration models for the supply chain and operational processes.
Impact of introducing information systems on organizational resilience.
Anticipatory innovation to enhance processes’ resilience.
Strategic approach and dynamic capabilities for becoming a resilient organization.

and why these are the important issues that warrant further investigation.

Conclusion

This paper’s reference list contains more than 200 items. Combined with the sorting and review done in the paper this is very valuable resource for any researcher of organisational resilience.

Reference

Annarelli, A., & Nonino, F. (2015). Strategic and operational management of organizational resilience: Current state of research and future directions Omega DOI: 10.1016/j.omega.2015.08.004

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Christchurch earthquake…again!?!

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Revised on: 2011-03-22

Oh dear…another earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, less than 6 months after the previous disaster, and this time perhaps even more devastating. One thing for sure, this community is having its disaster plans, business continuity measures and its resilience (and resolve) tested to the full. I can only imagine what I must be like, seeing the previous recovery efforts shattered to pieces in a matter of seconds. Six months ago I wrote about the previous earthquake to hit Christchurch, now it is time for it again. While there isn’t much I can do personally from here, what I can do is dig up some of my older posts that deal with business continuity, emergency supply chains, disaster recovery and last, but not least, resilience.

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Christchurch earthquake and transportation

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Christchurch, New Zealand, has been hit by an earthquake. Having spent some time living there myself, I can only imagine the damage to the buildings familiar to me, as I scour the news for the most recent photos and reports. Judging from the news images and videos of the Christchurch earthquake, the damage seems severe enough in places. How will the city recover? Will they be able to pull together the resources and quickly return to business as usual? I believe they will, because some years ago New Zealand started a project called “Resilient organisations“. Will it work? This is the ultimate test, perhaps sooner than they planned.

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Humanitarian and military supply chains side-by side

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

The recent earthquakes in Samoa in the Pacific and in Padang in Indonesia are a poignant reminder for three chapters in my most recent book review, Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment by John Gattorna. In this book, the three chapters by Kim Winter and Michael Whiting and Kate Hughes point at why both military and humanitarian supply chains are needed for the overall best effective rescue effort. Only by combining the two, the strengths of both types of logistics can be exploited, where the extreme agility of rescue organizations can be matched with the extreme efficiency of the military.

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Resilience revisited

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Revised on: 2015-12-02

How many ways are there for defining vulnerability and criticality, really? Traditionally, risk matrixes have a likelihood/impact approach, but not always. Yesterday, I was examining a criticality/vulnerability matrix. Today, I will take a closer look at a criticality/preparedness matrix with a third susceptibility dimension added to it, as presented in the New Zealand research project Resilent Organisations, a project that has given me plenty of food for thought for my own research in assessing and analyzing resilience.

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Engineering transportation lifelines

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Revised on: 2011-02-25

New Zealand is probably not the fist country that comes to mind when thinking of state-of-the-art transportation lifeline engineering.  Nonetheless, I think it is time to consider New Zealand as being one of the countries at the very forefront. A 2008 research project, initiated by the New Zealand Transport Agency, provides a close look at how New Zealand practices  lifelines engineering. The report is well-written, to the point and provides insight sand recommendations that are applicable not only to New Zealand, but to road and transport authorities anywhere.

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Supply Chain Management – Emergency Management

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Revised on: 2011-08-01

Yes. No doubt about it. Reduction, Readiness, Response and Recovery are four key elements in the New Zealand Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002. But how can this be related to supply chain management? Well, from time to time any supply chain will face the possibility of being disrupted, severed, delayed or severely impacted.

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How New Zealand develops resilient organisations

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

Is New Zealand better prepared for a disaster than other countries? As our infrastructure and organizations become ever more networked and interdependent there is a growing need to focus on managing overall system risk. In particular, there is a need to focus not only on the vulnerability of our systems to failure, but also on our ability to manage and minimize the impact of any failures. New Zealand has realized this and is currently halfway through a six year research project designed to assist organizations in recovering their economic competitiveness after hazard events.

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